#im very glad i decided to read this now
Quick lil’ short story for the Hallowed Hopes AU because I’m trying to get out of my writer’s block. Might post on AO3 too, idk.
Important notes before you read:
- Anything italicized (”like this”)is written. This is to differentiate between written words and spoken dialogue.
- “- - -” represents Ghost erasing their writing before writing something else to save unnecessary descriptions.Alright, enjoy!
Ghost awoke with a start, their eyes taking a moment to adjust to the low light. The usual sense of momentary dissociation one was met with upon waking up hit them hard, and they spent several seconds recalling where they were are why.
The locals had called the hanging cocoon of weaver’s silk and dirt the Beast’s Den. Then again, those locals had knocked them out and kidnapped them, so who knew if anything they said was true. Upon waking up, they’d been able to feel one of the seals nearby, and after some searching, had found the second of the three seals they needed to break; Herrah the Beast, Queen of Deepnest. Gods, they hope they never end up with a title that long.
They’d broken the seal. Or, at least, they were pretty sure they had. They’d done the same as they’d done with Monomon’s seal, and that seemed to have worked pretty well.
They pushed themself into a sitting position on the edge of the stone plinth and surveyed the room, searching for their lantern. The bright ball of encased lumaflies was a few yards away, and they lunged at it from where they sat, picking it up and positioning it awkwardly between they horns before a nearby snort of half-hearted amusement caught their attention. They turned their head back to the plinth only to be met by the trademark red cloak of a creature who’d caused them many troubles staring at them with eyes that seemed clouded by thought. She sat with her needle strewn across her lap, her chin resting in one of her hands. She wasn’t attacking them, which was an odd, but welcome change.
Her lack of aggression stopped Ghost from reaching for their nail. Instead, they met her eyes before wandering back to the plinth and sitting down next to her, noticing when her head tilted away, seemingly in an attempt to avoid their emotionless face.
She sighed. “So you’ve slain the Beast… and you head towards that fated goal.” Ghost tilted their head. The cloaked figure shook hers and turned a bit to finally face them. “I’d not have obstructed this happening, but it caused me some pain to knowingly stand idle.”
They gave her a look. “Knowingly stand idle?” Would’ve helped a hell of a lot if she’d “knowingly stood idle.”
“…What? You might think me stern but I’m not completely cold,” she added, as though reading their thoughts, the slightest hint of knowing amusement in her voice. “We do not choose our mothers, or the circumstance into which we are born. Despite all the ills of this world, I’m thankful for the life she granted me. It’s quite a debt I owed. Only in allowing her to pass, and taking the burden of the future in her stead, can I begin to repay it. Leave me now, ghost. Allow me a moment alone before this bedchamber becomes forever a shrine.”
There… There was a lot to unpack there.
Herrah was… Herrah was her…
Without realizing, and definitely without intending to, Ghost wrapped the cloaked spider (beast?) in their arms tightly as they started shaking in barely perceptible crying. Quirrel had just seemed confused when they broke Monomon’s seal. He’d just seemed tired. But here…
They’d killed her mother. She should hate them. She had every reason to, and it had previously seemed like she already did, but now here she was, mourning like this had just been some sorry news delivered by a medic.
“Ghost, vessel, get off!” she hissed, shoving them back with what felt like more than two arms, not that such a detail was particularly surprising now. The action brought them back to reality, back to the fact that they were breaking down, that she should be trying to kill them, that—
“What are you doing?” there wasn’t a hint of concern in her voice. Her words came out dipped in interest and lathered in a demand for an answer that they couldn’t properly communicate.
In an attempt to get something across, they slid from the plinth and bent down over the dirt floor. Ghost brushed their hand across it in a decently sized area, smoothing the ground before balling up a fist and using their index finger to write down a single word that seemed to do a hell of a good job getting their point across.
“Crying,” they wrote.
They could feel her eyes burning holes in their shell. “Have you always been able to do that?”
They turned to her, searching for elaboration.
“Write? Have you always been able to write? Is… is that not new, I mean?”
Ghost nodded. They always had been, in a very literal sense. They couldn’t remember a time when they couldn’t write. They’d had to develop fine motor skills to hold a writing utensil, sure, but they’d always been able to put words down, it was everything else that was problematic.
“Do you have a name?”
They nodded again, brushing a palm across their previous writing to erase it and then scribbling out a new word; “Ghost.”
“I mean before, not what I’ve called you.”
They faced her and pointed to the word. They’d been called other things, sure, but that was their name, regardless of who had given it to them. They were the Ghost of Hallownest, and there was nothing else to it.
“Do you have a name?” they then wrote out beneath it.
“You never figured it out?”
They shook their head.
“…Hornet. My name is Hornet.”
“How the fuck was I supposed to know that?”
Hornet laughed. “I don’t know, everyone else seems to know it!”
“That’s weird. - - - You’re weird. - - - Your name is weird.”
“Thank you?” she replied, her words drawn out. If Ghost could, they would have smiled. But a thought crossed their mind, a question that needed to be asked, but that they knew would turn the mood sour.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“You can, theoretically. Gods know if I’ll care to answer.”
They erased everything they’d written, and smoothed a larger area of floor, preparing for the potential of this becoming… drawn out.
“Was she your mother?”
And with that, the room became deathly silent.
